TWO VISIONS IN HEART of DARKNESS

      When I read Edward Said’s essay about Heart of Darkness, I realised that Said not only

mentions his critic about the novel but also we can see Conrad through Said’s eyes. Said sees

him differently than the other colonial writers of his time because he has been self-conscious of his actions and these has been expressed through Marlow. In Conrad’s time, independence was for whites and Europeans, while oppression and slavery was for those considered inferior.

     Said sees this novel as an imperialist text because he says that “politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist.” It is a way of suggesting that Conrad’s style reflects his political philosophy, but I do not agree with Said for I think that Conrad wanted to show how imperialism works and he has been very realistic while describing the environment, the natives and the Europeans, for example: “When one has got to make correct entries,  one comes to hate those savages- hate them to the death.” (pg.47) The clerk says this to Marlow, when they encounter for the first time. Here we see the Europeans feelings towards the natives. Also we can see how the Europeans treat them. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.” This passage is a good example of the treatments of the natives. Nobody cares if when they die. They are treated like animals. Marlow describes the behaviours as the natives as “they howled and leaped, spun, and made horrid faces.” These passages that I have quoted seems to me very realistic and that is why I do not agree that is an imperialist text. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is all about Europe’s brutal mission to colonize the dark world.

      In his essay, Said has made two arguments. The first one is that even though the Europeans have withdrew from Africa and Asia, they still retained rule over the markets, morals, and education in these places and I agree with Said. We can still encounter many traces of Europeans in these countries, although they seemed to left their colonies. Now they say that we are just helping them to develop. The second argument claims that imperialism was something for the 19^th century and not something that would continue even in the post-colonial world. This argument also says that imperialism, like everything else in the world, had its time of popularity and it eventually passed. As I stated before now developed countries colonize the countries they want by saying we are helping them developing themselves. This is just a modern word for imperialism and so they continue to exploit these countries according to their benefits.